Juneteenth, Shaw University and the Pivot Point of Progress

The juxtaposition of Juneteenth and Shaw University is a historical nugget worth mining.

It was June 19, 1865, when a couple thousand Union troops — many of them Black men — showed up in Galveston Bay, Texas, announcing that a quarter of a million of the state’s Black people who woke up that morning believing they were slaves actually were free by executive order. The Emancipation Proclamation a year and a half prior in 1863 unshackled slaves in areas of the United States not under Confederate control. Yet the 13th Amendment abolished slavery throughout the entire country when Congress passed it Jan. 31, 1865. The arrival of those Union soldiers in Texas meant Black people there were free, too. That’s the origin of Juneteenth.

The wheels of progress were in motion north of Texas, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where former white Union soldier and Baptist preacher Henry Martin Tupper founded a school to educate Black people. The date was Dec. 1, 1865. The school would become Shaw University, which for 158 years has offered liberation through higher education.

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